The Duck Builder Simulation

The Duck Builder
simulation is a lesson that comes around every year and is sort of a tradition.
Yes it’s a bit silly but the Year 3 children like doing it (with some of the older
pupils fondly recalling it when they see me doing it with a new class each
year) and when you actually look at the skills it is teaching the children it’s
place in the curriculum can be clearly justified.

The program itself if a free download (so those that wish
can use it at home which is always a benefit) and is quite straightforward to
run – you just change the various physical features of the duck like it’s wing
length or body size and then see whether this causes it to fly up, down or
straight across. Whilst getting it to fly perfectly will result in a nice ‘well
done’ message appearing on the screen, a duck which either crashes or shoots up
into space since it has not been designed well enough will instead result in a
rather lame duck-related joke being shown.

To keep the children focused during their use of the
program, I give them a worksheet I made up which asks them to investigate how
particular features of the duck affect how well it flies.

To begin, they create four ducks with every feature set to 0,
except for the flap speed which is either a low or middle-range number. Once
each has been made and the effects of each set of designs observed (with a low
speed making it fly down and a speed of about 25 making it fly across), the children
can then predict what value the flap speed needs to be for the duck to fly up
and then go on to test it by creating another, fifth, duck.

Next, they create a new set of four ducks to this time
examine how the wing length affects the duck’s ability to fly. Again, each duck
only differs with its front and back settings (which both have to be identical
in any duck for it to fly). The ducks they make either fly up or down and so once
more they can then attempt to predict and test what length the wings need to be
for it fly straight across (hopefully noticing that since it flew down with a
length of 23 and up with a length of 27, that the desired length needs to be
between 24 and 26).

In both these investigations, children are learning how to:

systematically gather and record results;

only change the feature of the duck being investigated
whilst keeping the other variables the same (constant);

identify patterns in their results;

make and test predictions using ICT.

As I said earlier, the program is quite fun to use and
although it only takes about half an hour to fully explore its capabilities,
does teach the children some valuable modelling skills and is a piece of
software that they will all remember using as they get older.